This week on LinkedIn Strategic’s CEO, Marc Hausman, pondered the question of whether marketers have lost their mojo as they’ve become more focused on analytics-driven campaigns and results. It’s easy to see how this can happen as data provides tangible metrics to link back to contribution to revenue and leads us to do the same thing again and again to replicate success.

While Hausman laments the bygone era of EDS’s cat herding commercial and other memorable campaigns, he offers three strategies for marketers to think about to get their mojo back.

:

From deepening their engagement in business strategy to finding the vendors that bring “exciting, daring, and big idea[s],” Hausman strongly encourages marketers to step away from blindly following along.

I’d like to offer one more suggestion to Marc’s three and it’s to be authentic. Having recently re-watched Steve Jobs’ iconic 1997 talk on what makes a successful marketing campaign, it resonates in an era of data-driven marketing, perhaps more firmly than it did 21 years ago.

For Jobs, marketing is successful, especially in a noisy world like we live in, when it taps into values. In the context of Apple, both in 1997 and in 2018, the key marketing message for Apple is not that they make computers, but that they believe in people with passion who can change the world. And this resulted in the Crazy Ones campaign, an emotive and passionate call to arms for the company.

While most of us are not making industry-defining commercials or print campaigns, we can still fold this spirit and encouragement into the content marketing campaigns that we’re working on.  Because in doing so we can take content from being a thinly veiled marketing message or sales pitch and turn into something more; something that connects with the reader, engages them and creates not just a customer, but an advocate.

To stay updated on the latest trends and best practices in marketing, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter.